Brief history lesson: the AKP, the governing party at present in Turkey, wants greater integration with the EU. It needs democratic reforms to stay in place for it to retain power in the future, and further integration with the EU would presumably stabilize those reforms.
So why, then, is the Washington Institute for Near East Policy—home of Clinton apparatchik Dennis Ross, co-founded by Martin Indyk, and purportedly center-left pro-Israel thinktank—now slamming the AKP?
Well, apparently, because it’s also Islamic. And being an Islamic party, the AKP invites Islamic leaders to its country—even unsavory characters such as Omar Al-Bashir, who is responsible for a good deal of the mess in Darfur.
Now clearly, I don’t mean to defend the actions and policies of Al-Bashir or his ilk.
But there’s a very significant issue at stake here: if Western diplomats won’t engage violent Islamists like Al-Bashir, who will? And how do you then reign them in?
The folks at WINEP seem to think the answer is complete isolation.
But I have to think a better way is to have groups like the AKP pull them closer towards the center. As a part of that process, the AKP will inevitably also some mixed signals to the West, many of which Sonay Cagaptay cites at length in the WINEP op-ed cited above.
Yet those signals, inevitable as they are, ought to be overlooked. If it’s really trying to poise itself as an alternative to more hardline Israeli lobbies in the US, WINEP would do much better to take it in stride.